VANCOUVER - About once a week, fifteen-year-old Julia walks the two blocks from her Vancouver high school to Hot Shots Sun Studio in Kerrisdale for a dose of UV rays.

“I enjoy it,” says the teen.

For Julia, whose name is being withheld at her mother’s request, tanning is a simple pleasure. She likes the warm glow it gives her skin and the way it makes her feel.

Julia says her mother first took her for an indoor tan at the age of 14 before a family spring break vacation to Hawaii.

“In that case, it was about preparing to go away, getting a base tan,” she says.

A base tan is a gradual buildup of colour many vacationers believe protects the skin from sunburn brought on by sudden, long hours of exposure to tropical rays.

Julia returned to the salon after her holiday to “maintain” and a year later is a regular user.

It’s not heroin, or alcohol she is using, but if health authorities have their way, B.C. will soon introduce legislation making it illegal for teens like her to indulge.

It may be a pale prom this year.

Steve Gilroy, executive director of the Joint Canadian Tanning Association and owner of a Kelowna tanning salon, says teens make up less than five per cent of B.C.’s tanning salon users, but prom and spring break bring an annual bump in business.

B.C. Health minister Michael de Jong is studying a report from the Indoor Tanning Working Group, which heard from health and industry stakeholders last fall, before making recommendations on new regulations.

The report was commissioned by the province after the Union of B.C. Municipalities passed a resolution at the end of September calling for regulation of tanning beds.

It is Health Canada’s position that there is “no safe way to tan.” Tanning beds give off concentrated doses of UVA — as much as five times the strength of the sun at midday, and studies show a significant dose-response correlation between tanning bed exposure in youth and skin cancers.

The BC Cancer Agency and the Canadian Pediatric Association, the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Dermatology Association all support a legislated ban on teens using artificial tanning beds.

“To be blunt, there is no safe level of exposure to UV rays,” says Dr. David McLean, Head of Cancer prevention at the BC Cancer Agency and a professor in the department of dermatology at the University of British Columbia.

The age at which skin is exposed, whether in a tanning bed or outdoors, is a factor in later development of skin cancers, says McLean.

“It takes time to develop cancer and it is the cumulative amount of ultra violet light that is the major factor. The higher the dose early on, the greater the risk of developing cancer later.”

Public health advocate and melanoma survivor, Linda Jeaurond, 51, says her two daughters used tanning beds as teens: They argued that their friends were doing it, they needed the protective base tan and, hey, there was no law against it.

“I could reinforce with them that smoking and drinking was bad because it’s illegal. They said ‘Mom, tanning is legal, it can’t be that bad.’”

Besides, tanned girls look better.

Jeaurond got it: she too had tried to colour-match her peers as a teen.

During Jeaurond’s childhood in Northern Ireland, she felt no pressure to tan. Wintry pale skin is typical of the Irish, and Jeaurond never gave her milky colouring a second thought.

She was a teenager when her family immigrated to Canada.

Jeaurond landed in a new world, and a peer group with its own peculiar conventions, values and behaviours. She was teased. “When I got here I learned that I had skin like raw chicken,” she says.

Jeaurond tried to tan because she wanted to fit in. “Desperate” to look like her peers, she took Keratin pills that turned her palms and knees bright orange, and tried to lying out in the sun, but her skin would only burn or freckle.

It was unsafe sun behaviour, and her physicians have cited those teen attempts at tanning as the source of the melanoma that appeared on her arm five years ago.

She was lucky to catch the small mole early (it “jabbed” and “itched,” but showed none of the visual irregularities associated with melanoma). Her daughters both stopped using tanning beds after their mother’s diagnosis.

Jeaurond’s quest for burnished beauty reflects a 20th century esthetic that equates tanned skin with health, vigour and attractiveness. Women in the 19th century went to great lengths to shield their complexions from the sun: parasols, gloves, wide-brimmed hats offered protection.

Translucent skin was associated with the aristocracy, and freckled or swarthy skin reflected a working class status.

This esthetic was commonly reflected in art — Botocelli’s Venus is white as marble, although the common skin tone in Italy is olive; and Jesus was typically depicted as white-skinned in European art. In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara visits Rhett Butler in jail to try to seduce him into giving her $300 she desperately needs to pay taxes on her plantation, Tara.

She almost has him fooled that all is well and that Tara has returned to its prewar glory — until he raises her hand to kiss it, sees the freckles, and drops it in horror.

“You’ve been working with those hands,” Butler says.

In the 20th century, as work migrated indoors, the trend began to reverse. Coco Chanel is credited as starting the bronzed fad after returning with a tan from a trip to the French Riviera in the 1920s.

When Danish physician Niels Finsen discovered phototherapy in the late 1800s, sunlight gained a reputation as a tonic.

Phototherapy used exposure to daylight or specific wavelengths of light to treat psoriasis, acne and alopecia and rickets, a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.

Attitudes continued to evolve as vacationing, sunbathing and outdoor activities like golf and cycling came to represent leisure, affluence and good health.

As early as 1907 French dermatologists were connecting the dots between skin cancers among outdoor workers and sun exposure, and by 1930 UV radiation was recognized as a carcinogen by the U.S. government.

Even as evidence of the harmful effects of exposure to UV rays became clear, sun tanning’s positive associations with relaxation, wealth and leisure have been difficult to change.

A 1987 study of California sunbathers showed that tanners were less concerned with health than the appearance of health.

Some tanning bed users, like 21-year-old Amber Harkousha, a salon associate at Hot Shots, are willing to trade options on their future health for the benefits a warm tanning bed provides today.

Harkousha was diagnosed with polyarticular juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was a young child.

The disease causes crippling joint inflammation and pain. “At the age of 15 I couldn’t walk, brush my hair or teeth,” she says. Heat pads have always helped ease the pain.

Like Julia, Harkousha started using tanning salons in her early teens.

She now tans at least once a week, for 15 minutes.

Harkousha says the warmth provides her with comfort that is both physical and emotional.

“I don’t worry about skin cancer,” she says. “For me, living every day of my life now without pain from my arthritis is more important than to worry about the future.”

Although she would prefer to have parental consent legislation rather than an all-out ban on teen tanning, she says a ban will not have a significant effect on her business.

“Less than five per cent of my clientele is in their teens,” she says. Of those, most come with their mothers, who are also clients.

“Our policy here is to advocate parental involvement. If I don’t know their moms, there is a dialogue. I have turned clients away.”

What happens then is a concern, says Marchischuk, who believes that safe tanning is possible in a controlled environment, but not necessarily in an uncontrolled environment, whether it’s the beach or an improperly managed tanning bed.

“I know if I turn a teen away from here for whatever reason, people are going to go somewhere else, up the street to that fly-by-night booth.”

Marchischuk uses Fitzpatrick skin typing, a classification scale, to evaluate a clients’ skin. She will not take a Type 1 that is genetically predisposed to burning as a client. (To evaluate your own skin, go to www.dermatology.ca).

In 2009, in Britain, a fair-skinned 14-year-old named Kirsty McRae spent 19 minutes in a coin-operated tanning bed and suffered first-degree burns on over 70 per cent of her body.

Following her high-profile case and the World Health Organization’s 2009 designation of tanning beds as a Class 1 carcinogen (like smoking or asbestos) Britain brought in legislation banning minors from using them.

In Canada, Nova Scotia has already banned teen tanning and a bylaw banning the practice goes into effect in several municipalities around Victoria B.C. this spring. New Brunswick has voluntary measures in place to limit teen tanning.

The BC Cancer Agency’s McLean is advocating for an all out ban on teen tanning — and no argument about proms, personal image, base tans or managed tanning will sway him.

“A base tan gives you the protection of about the same as a Number 4 sunscreen,” says McLean, “but it also damages your skin.”

McLean says he sees girls as young as 13 in his office that tan indoors, primarily because of peer pressure. He also advocates using a minimum of Number 60 sunscreen, and applying it in triple layers. “People generally apply too little.”

Kylie Nabata, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student at North Vancouver’s Handsworth secondary school is working to raise awareness and promote a tan-free grad.

Handsworth is competing with other schools across the province to get as many students as possible to pledge to go tan-free for grad.

“It’s not a bad thing to want to look nice,” says Nabata. “A lot of kids see celebrities and models with gorgeous golden skin and think that’s what looks nice.”

Pale skin has made at least one high-profile appearance on the red carpet: Angelina Jolie’s leg poking out of her black Valentino gown was ghostly, and was admired enough to get its own Twitter handle.

Nabata said Handsworth has tan-free grad volunteers from every part of the student body of different ethnicities, and looks, trying to get the message out that it’s also nice to look natural.

Steve Gilroy of the Joint Canadian Tanning Association, says he believes the proposed ban goes too far, but that regulations like warning signs, proper certification of tanning bed operators and parental consent are appropriate.

As for teen tanner Julia, she says she doesn’t feel “educated enough on the issues to comment” on whether tanning in a UV bed is safe. But as with most teenagers, the threat of future problems pales in comparison to the pleasure of the present moment.

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